When I started researching this topic, I expected the result to be a quick, one-part summary of the health effects of common chemicals in nail polish. I did not expect the wealth of information I found on public health concerns related to nail salons, especially the racial equity issues faced by workers who commonly experience a range of health problems related to occupational hazards.
As someone who uses very few beauty products, I never expected to focus on them in a blog post. However, access to nail salons and habits at home have changed during the pandemic, raising questions about long-term trends. And the examination of those things also brought to light questions of health – both for people who wear nail polish and people who work in salons.
I have a love-hate relationship with the sun. On one hand, I have seasonal depression and crave sunlight, but on the other hand, I burn easily, even while taking the most careful precautions. To make matters worse, common sunscreen ingredients are harmful to humans and the ecosystem in general. I’ve been planning this post for a while, but a recent sunscreen recall moved it up in priority.
Traditions bind families together but also contribute to stress that can tear them apart. 2020 was anything but ordinary, requiring flexibility and patience from all of us. Working and learning from home pulled back the curtain to reveal how much really happens behind-the-scenes, making many moms feel more seen, especially during the holidays. In this two-parter, we will look at finding balance in an unbalanced year.
Halloween is the time of year when we think of death and of natural cycles coming to an end. But what is Halloween like when we’ve already been thinking about death all year? This post examines our attraction to the expression of death in art. Watching outbreak movies during a pandemic and laughing at dark humor during times of crisis may actually be a psychological necessity.
In a world of single-use items, reusables are definitely attractive as a way of reducing environmental impact. This week’s post will compare major reusable menstrual products and their single-use equivalents, both in end-use waste volume and in price points. Hopefully part three of this series will be enough to help you make a more informed decision, should you choose to do so.
Gaining even a rough understanding of how many people in the United States alone are using single-use menstrual products helps us to understand how pervasive plastic waste is in our landfills. It is my intention with this post to have some fun crunching some numbers and to get a sense of how much of an impact our decisions have on the planet.
This series follows upon my Zero-Waste Lent experience last year, during which I tried not to generate any landfill waste, even while on my period. After the success of that post, I have intended for almost a year now to dive into some more detailed numbers around just how much waste is created by menstrual products in the US and what we can do about it.
In honor of the vacation we are currently enjoying, this post is about an amazing invention that is pretty standard across Japan and almost absent in America: the bidet. These devices are touted as more resource-friendly and bum-friendly than toilet paper, but the topic still seems to be avoided in polite conversation. And that’s what I’m here for – to do research and mention unmentionables.
If you live in or near a city, you probably see a large number of homeless, traveling, or down-on-their-luck people asking for assistance near street corners. For a couple years now, I have tried to have something a little more substantial than money on hand to give them. This post is an overview of things to consider when making care packages for homeless people.